Cycling is all that matters: malaria parasite is governed by different biological rhythms | New Voices in Infection Biology

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Talk abstract:

Plasmodium infection initiates when the vector, the Anopheles female mosquito, injectssporozoites (the parasite infectious form) in the skin of the mammalian host. In nature, Anopheles mosquitoes show a strong preference for biting during the night period, thus initiating a new infection cycle. We hypothesized that sporozoites rely on daily rhythms to prepare for the encounter with a mammalian host at specific periods of the day. In fact, we identified daily transcriptional rhythms in sporozoites, even if not undergoing cell division. This suggests that sporozoites in the salivary glands are in synchrony with the vector’s behavior. Interestingly, these same parasite form – sporozoites - once inside hepatocytes, initiate a replicative program originating thousands of new infectious forms, eventually released into the bloodstream. In spite of the critical role that the intra-hepatic phase of parasite development has for the successful establishment of the infection and the onset of disease, how the parasite achieves such a high replication rate remains utterly unexplored. Thus, we generated a rodent parasite line that allowed us to identify the temporal dynamicsof DNA replication throughout parasite intra-hepatic development and the pattern of DNA replication, with asynchronous DNA replicati n present until late stages of development.
Overall, our findings imply that parasites are governed by different biological rhythmsthroughout their entire life cycle, even when in a “quiescent” state.